The Unsung Hero of Innovation and Scale
There are countless books about scaling new ideas and growing companies. The right strategies, thinking, processes… There is one component that consistently is left out or under appreciated: data. The ability to know “what’s so” in whatever you’re up to.
Data can comes from everything, especially these days — contact lists on your phone, a database of customers, inventory of product — all of it critical to understanding exactly what is happening. Because once you understand what’s happening, you can take the next most critical step: doing something about it.
I had the pleasure of connecting with world renown data expert, Scott Taylor. Scott has a degree from UC Berkeley and has had several roles in the data world including work at Microsoft, Nielsen and was known as the Master Data evangelist at Dunn and Bradstreet. Through all of it, he has learned that measurement and data is a critical part of any change — a change for the better or even a change for the worst.
Plain and simple, data is the ability to scale anything that you’re doing. It allows you to do things more times — 10 more times, 100 times, billions of times. Any new ideas need that ability to scale.
Every business at its core wants to do three things:
Grow: become larger
Improve: make the processes and products better
Protect themselves: mitigate risk
Data is a key part of every one of those and it’s critical to how we function in modern times. But it can slow things down if not used effectively. There are couple of key take aways I learned:
1. Get really clear on what data you’re collecting, what you’re measuring and why. What does success look like? Is it a number of units sold, a quantity of contacts in the database, even throughput of an existing process. You can change what you’re measuring later, but you need a place to start.
2. Data doesn’t have to slow things down. It should actually do the opposite. We can solve problems really quickly without over analyzing — and then look at the data later to understand how to scale it.
3. Data is the lifeblood of your business. Without tracking it consistently you’re unable to see clearly what’s happening; at an individual level or at a company level. How you feel about what’s happening might be (and probably is) disconnected from the realities of it.
Whether you’re growing a billion dollar company or just getting your startup off the ground, having it grounded in real data is critical at any point.